You are at a competition, you aren’t doing very well. You lost a few close matches and you are in 50th place. In your last match you are playing against your sister team. The team who has helped you since the beginning, if you ever need help they are there for you. They are currently in 7th place.
If they win they will move into 1st and be able to select the team that they want, giving them a really good chance of winning. You have a good chance of beating them because their alliance partner is weak.
Do you go easy and let them win?
Please give it some thought and answer honestly.
Edit: For the simple fact that no one is even considering it, we are now assuming that the team they want to pick is your team.
No I would not go easy on them. In fact, we played on of the teams we mentored last year, 1120, in the finals at Sacramento this year. That was not quite your hypothetical situtation, but I would still play to the best of my ability, no matter my friend’s position. I would try to show off, hoping to be picked myself.
This does not mean that I do not want my sister team to win. It simply means that I want them to win fairly.
Hell NO!
You play your hardest, anything less would be disrespectful.
I know if I was on the seeded alliance, I’d want everyone to try their hardest to kick my butt. I’d expect it, because if I was in that position it’s what I’d be trying to do.
This isn’t a Nash Equilibrium problem.
Go out there, kick some butt, and be the best you can be.
As a coach, how could I ask my HS drivers to hold back? How could I tell them “we can win this, but we’re not going to”. Or worse… how could I mislead them by giving them a losing strategy? Not to mention my alliance partner…
I hope this is as much a no brainer for everyone else as it is for me.
However, this does not mean you can go around beating on them the whole time. Just play your game, and play it fairly. Whoever wins will come out on top.
I like to think about it in the terms of 60 vs. 254 last season. Had we gone up against the Poofs, we would not have ever gone easy on them.
Play your hardest. This isn’t about who’s in first, or who could be. Even if you are in 50th, if you prove yourself to another team, and they think you will compliment thier robot, then you show them what you are worth.
18 teams in the finals, guaranteed they are not 1-18 seeds.
I would definitly still play my hardest. They are in first place because they earned it, not cuz teams ‘took it easy’ on them, so giving them competition is good, for both of you. Everyone wants a good showing in their last match, and a strong competitive match is definitly a good showing.
With FIRST I have noticed that the teams all carry a mutual respect for the other teams and no one gets upset about teams who ‘put up a good fight’ they just gain more respect because you tried your best.
[edit] when voting i accidently clicked the wrong one… its early
Absolutely play your hardest.
That is the only fair approach to your partner and the other teams.
If you play easy, the word will quickly spread.
Soon, the team you were being nice to “only won because you let them”.
You both lose respect within FIRST, and reputations die a long, slow death.
The beauty of FIRST is that you:
COMPETE like crazy for the 2 minutes you are on the field - no friends, no allies, no debts - except to your partner at the moment,
then
COOPERATE like crazy all the rest of the time, even to the point of helping the very teams that may whip you later in the day.
At the risk of angering people I would have to say that I might let them win. To me, if they were going to pick you, it is all part of strategy. Doing this is not illegal.
I believe I would not take it easy… Its not fair to your alliance partner and besides its all in fun… If you throw in the towel on the match and go easy then people would probably hold grouges or something and it would drain out the fun… shrugs who knows…
No matter the situation, you should never give up. We had a bad luck situation at nats. Against the #1 tewice. We could have given upl, giving 93 the #1 spot (they were undefeated) they were cosidering us as a 2nd round pick. We aren’t really close as teams, btu we still played our best, knocking them to #5
Do not go easy on them. This is the same thing as throwing a match. Remember last year when there was alot of talk about “setting up matches” (sorry cant remeber the exact name we used last year) were the teams agreeed to leave each other’s stacks alone and then just fight for the top. If you did this in any other sport you would be banned from that sport for life, it has happen in baseball many of times. IF they want to be in 1st place then they will win, but give them a run for their money
This happened to us in Detroit. Now we weren’t in 50th, we were in 12th or so, and Chief Delphi (47) was in the top 5 I think. We really wanted to pair up with them, they had a bot that perfectly complimented ours. We played them in qualifying. A friend of mine from the Juggernauts (1) came up to me and said “hey, are you gonna let them win?” I think others probably thought that was the case too. Well, we went out, played them, and beat them. We never play to lose, or even go easy. We play our best every match.
Absolutely and unequivocally, NO!
Here is a real world problem though (along the lines)…A team on Saturday morning has lost it’s drive team. They are somewhere on the road but no one knows where. Team### asks for teams to put up a drive team until their drivers arrive. You are lucky enough to have a backup drive crew to drive for them only to find out that in their second match, they are against you. What do you do? What do you do?
HECK NO! FIRST is still a competiton. Anything less than that is disrespectful for those who tired their hardest and won, and it’s also disrespectful for the sister team (not only to mention opening the avenu of “Well, they just lost since they get helped by that team…”)
We had a similar occurence during last year’s Champs. We didn’t do as well as VCU or Annapolis, and we moved are way up to 8th place by winning our last match by just a little. We picked our alliance partners and then lost in the quarter finals. Neddless to say, we found that another team we were very good friends with were going to pick us, and they ended up doing very well. Should we have thrown our last match to get them to pick us? No. It’s disrespectful for our alliance parter, our opponents, and all the teams who won fair and square.
